Will North

by Water, Stone, Heart (v5)

  She didn't know why she knew this≔ the knowledge came to her as if through her pores. There was an ache in this man, the ache of betrayal. It was palpable.

  Andrew looked away.

  “Maybe Lee's right; maybe you are a witch. Or a mind reader.”

  “I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have—”

  “Yes. She left me. For a lawyer, someone who earns a lot more than a university professor.”

  He stared at his empty plate, then looked up again. “And now, Nicola, I think it's time I trundled home to bed.”

  Nicola suddenly felt like a vampire who had sucked the life out of this lovely man.

  “Andrew, please don't; I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”

  “I know, Nicki. I'm still a little raw is all, like some reptile that's shed its skin and is still waiting for the layer underneath to toughen up.”

  “I remember how that feels,” she said.

  Randi had been resting his chin on one of Andrew's dusty boots and was asleep. Andrew slipped his foot out as gently as he could and stood. The dog looked up, then put its head down on the floor with a sigh.

  “Look,” Andrew continued, “dinner was wonderful—almost as wonderful as your company, but not quite. I've got a big day tomorrow; we start building the rest of the hedge, now that the foundation is laid.”

  She rose and stood by the table. “Thank you for the flowers, Andrew.”

  “Sorry they weren't a bit more, um … lush. You deserve better.” Andrew stood at the door for a moment, waiting for Nicola to open it. She seemed riveted to the floor. He lifted the latch, stepped out into the warm evening, then turned and smiled.

  “Good night, Nicola,” he said quietly, “and thank you.”

  Nicola managed to smile. “Good night, Andrew.”

  She watched him walk up the lane and turn into Dunn Street. Then she closed the door.

  “Shit!” she said.

  Information on the storms of 16th August 2004 comes mainly from 5 tipping bucket rain gauges in the area: at Slaughterbridge in the River Camel catchment, at Woolstone Mill, Tamarstone and Crowford Bridge in the Bude catchment, and at Lesnewth/Trevalec in the Valency catchment. All use 0.2 mm buckets. The first four record the number of tips at fixed time intervals, giving 15 minute rainfall accumulations, while the last records individual tip times with a precision of 10 seconds.

  Brian Golding, ed., “Numerical Weather Prediction,” Forecasting Research Technical Report No. 459, Met Office

  seven

  “How many of those stones you reckon you'll pick up and put down before you find one you fancy?” Jamie had walked up behind Andrew and was smiling.

  They were working on the “filler” level, laying stone atop the uneven grounders to create a level base on which to build the rest of the hedge. Earlier Wednesday morning, Jamie and Becky had gone through the rock pile and sorted the stones in rows, placing the largest closest to the wall. Jamie explained that you always lay the biggest stones first, so you don't have to lift them very high.

  Andrew studied the rock he'd just lifted. “I'm searching for one that fits.”

  “Makes sense, but for one thing.”

  “What's that?”

  “You're doubling your work every time you lift one and put it back. Soon be exhausted and have little to show for your sweat.”

  “So what's your solution?”

  “You don't search for the right stone, lad; you discover it.”

  “Huh?”

  Jamie laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “I'm being a bit unfair to you; it takes years. Lads! Becky! Over here for a moment.”

  The crew gathered around the area where Andrew was working.

  “You've all got the physics down pretty good,” Jamie said to his crew. He'd taught them how to lift big stones safely and how to find the right side for the face of the hedge. He'd taught them to lay “one on two and two on one”—that is, to make sure the middle of the stone in the upper layer sits above the joint of the two stones beneath it, and vice versa.

  “Now it's time for the metaphysics,” he said.

  They all looked at him like pilgrims at the oracle.

  “If a stone was a perfect cube,” he explained, “it would have six faces. That's six faces with four rotation possibilities, or twenty-four ways of being presented. It's no wonder you struggle to find one that fits, eh? But there's a trick to make this easier. When you look at the hedge face you're working on, I want you to remember this: You can find a stone to fit the space in front of you, or you can find a space to fit the stone. You have two choices, not one. See?

  “The way I think about it, a hedge exists even before it's built. It's a space within space that wants to be filled. Stone is just the filling for the space. So when you're working the face, I want you to think about both the space you're working and the stone you're working with. Hedge building's like doing a jigsaw puzzle without a picture: You have pieces and spaces, and you just match them up. The difference here is that the pieces are bloody heavy. So never pick up a stone twice. As you make your rows, try to keep several of its spaces in your mind's eye; then pick up a stone that fits one of those spaces. In a sense, it's simple: You just put the stone where it goes. The learning is in understanding where it's going even before you lift it. So spend more time looking at your stones, but leave them on the ground. You'll soon learn to discover what fills the spaces, just by looking and rotating the stone in your head. Get the picture?”

  They all nodded, though tentatively.

  “Plus there's the practical problem: If you keep picking up stones and putting them down again, we'll never get to the pub.”

  They laughed and went back to work, but at a less-frantic pace now, each of them doing a lot more staring than lifting, moving more slowly but, increasingly, with more confidence. Soon, there were more “ahs!” than “uhs” as they discovered the stone they were looking for.

  As disparate a group as they were, they worked together well, each addressing the hedge face at his own pace and with his own rhythm. Andrew found the work deeply, almost primitively satisfying: moving stone, making hedge. It also gave him time to think, and what he thought about mostly was dinner at Nicola's.

  He'd said too much. He didn't fault Nicola for asking about his divorce; he just wished now he'd been more circumspect. It wasn't the same as going on and on about the breakup, the way he'd done in the first few months. It wasn't like him to be so open, so undefended. And yet—despite her sharp tongue—something about Nicola made it safe. Though they traded verbal sword thrusts like adversaries, it only seemed to draw them closer. And he liked getting closer to Nicola. He liked that a lot.

  At one point, Burt hoisted a large stone and dropped it into place with a hollow thwok.

  “You hear that, Burt?” Jamie called from a few yards away. He looked at the rest of the crew. “You all hear that sound? That's the sound of a bad fit.”

  He walked to where Burt was standing like a boy caught misbehaving. The others joined them.

  “See, this looks like a good join, from the front and the top, anyway. It's touching everywhere. But that hollow sound tells you that some part of the stone isn't in contact with its neighbors.”

  Burt moved to lift the stone off the hedge face.

  “Leave it be, big guy,” Jamie said, placing a hand on Burt's thick arm. “Remember the rule: Never pick up a stone twice. When you get a bad fit, you fix it with the next stone.”

  Jamie peered at Burt's stone in its place. He put pressure on the inside edge and the big stone rocked slightly.

  “There's your weak spot, Burt. All it needs is trigging.”

  “Triggin'?” Burt said. None of them had a clue what Jamie was talking about.

  “A trig's a small stone you use as a shim, almost always on the inside of the face, like here.” Jamie poked around the stone yard and found a shard. He lifted the inside edge of Burt's stone, slipped the smaller stone beneath it, and then dropped the big one with a loud thwack.r />
  “That's what we want to hear! Like the clack of two snooker balls when they collide. See, you have to listen to the stone. Stone will tell you when it's happy.”

  Andrew saw Case lift a skeptical eyebrow. Listen to the stone. Don't look for a stone; discover it. A hedge is a space within space that wants to be filled. It was like sitting at the feet of a Zen master, Andrew thought to himself. What he'd thought would be a course about developing a new set of mechanical skills was turning into a lesson in contemplation, in the use of all your senses, not just the application of brute force.

  After lunch, Jamie hauled a five-foot-tall piece of plywood out of his truck and carried it to the slowly rising hedge. It was cut in the shape of a shallow D, except that the curve of the D didn't join the vertical at the top.

  “Right now, lads … and lady,” he said, bowing to Becky with exaggerated formality, “let's talk geology. Back at my place, as you saw, I've got granite wherever I look. But here on the coast, we're in a different geologic province, an older one. Here we've got slate. Slate is a metamorphic rock, which means that pressure and heat have turned it from what it was originally into something else—‘morphed it,’ as the computer types might say. Slate started out as shale, which started out as fine grains of clay and other minerals washed down from the hills into muddy deltas eons ago. As the sediments deepened, the weight exerted tremendous pressure on the layers below and changed them, hardened them. The heat and weight of the volcanic rock that came later—the granites we see up on Bodmin Moor—hardened the slates even more.

  “A lot of the slate and shale in the buildings and hedges along this coast was mining waste: rock blasted loose by the old tin-mining industry hereabouts. The Delabole quarry just over the hills there, a bit west of Camelford, produces high-quality slate, for roofing tiles and such. Been operating since Elizabethan times, they have. But here we're working with rougher stuff.

  “Now, there's good news and bad news in hedging with slate. The bad news is you don't get big pieces. The good news is that slate has nice, smooth parallel faces, and, if a piece is irregular, it's easy to split and dress. Slate has an obvious grain and flat cleavage planes. Of course, that's also why it busts up.

  “Stacks real good, though,” Case commented.

  Jamie nodded. “As our colleague, Mr. Casehill here, knows well, it's easy to build walls and houses from slate; you just slap them and stack them, like flapjacks, and mortar them together.”

  Case smirked.

  “But out in the fields, where most hedges get laid, you can't be fussing around with mortar. You have to come up with some other way to make the stones hold together. And that other way is called gravity.”

  “Is this where the herringbone thing comes in?” Becky asked.

  “Top prize to the lady!” Jamie said.

  “But it's so dainty-looking,” she said.

  “That's how it looks, but not how it works. How it works is like interlocking teeth, like a zipper. Tight and strong. It's all about the batter.”

  “Is that like mortar?” Case asked. Burt and Newsome laughed. It was getting to be a running gag with Case.

  Jamie didn't even respond. Instead, he grabbed the big piece of plywood.

  “See that curve? That's what we call the ‘batter.’ A Cornish hedge curves inward, gently, and that curve creates stability. It focuses the weight of each stone toward the center. It puts gravity to work holding the whole structure in place.

  “See, stones are lazy buggers,” Jamie continued. “You may have noticed this already: They don't like to be lifted. They don't like to be moved. They don't like to be stood on end. They want to lie down as soon as possible. It's not surprising; they're elderly. Their natural disposition is to be at rest, like your old granny. So your job, as a hedger, is to make them comfortable. How do you do that? By finding them a nice bed, and tucking them in.

  “That's what the herringbone pattern's all about. We call it ‘Jack-and-Jill,’ or ‘Darby-and-Joan,’ or—no offense, Becky—‘John-upon-Joan.’ Whatever the name, the idea is that each stone in one row is slanted to the left at an angle of fifty to seventy degrees, and to the right in the row above, and so on. And each stone has to lock into the one below and above.”

  “So where's the plywood come in?” Newsome asked.

  Jamie smiled. “What's the biggest contribution the Romans ever made to the world?”

  “Wine?” said Newsome.

  “Paved roads,” said Case, with authority.

  Burt shrugged.

  “Hot baths!” said Becky, and everyone laughed.

  Finally, Andrew mumbled, “The arch.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Arch-itect!” Jamie crowed. “The arch indeed! A curve of stones suspended in the air, something that ought to collapse but doesn't, because gravity itself holds the pieces in place, forces them tighter together, continuously.”

  He held the curved piece of plywood over his head and made an arch. Then he put it back down on its bottom corner, the curve facing in toward the center of the still-imaginary hedge.

  “The batter of a Cornish hedge is an inward curve that nearly straightens out at the top; it's like a Roman arch set on its side, and it has the same purpose: It confers strength. Oh, and one other thing …”

  “Sheep,” Burt grunted.

  “Right,” Jamie said. “It keeps the bloody sheep from scaling the hedge. As we say around here, ‘a good hedge will put a sheep on its back.’”

  “I'll be damned,” Newsome said.

  Jamie laughed. “Might be you will,” he said, “but not till this here job's done. Till then, you're just in Purgatory. Back to work, you lot.”

  “I think you're round the twist,” Nicola said.

  Anne Trelissick looked up from her drawing board, where she'd been putting the final touches on a pen-and-ink illustration of a rather endearing-looking rat dressed in corduroy breeches and a plaid waistcoat. It was part of a series she was doing for a new edition of Kenneth Grahame's children's classic, The Wind in the Willows. Nicola had been looking over her shoulder as Anne worked. She had taken drawing classes in Boston, of course, but she still marveled at Anne's anatomical precision and her ability to give character to animals.

  “No, you don't,” Anne said, taking a sip from a mug of tea. “You know I'm telling you the truth, and it scares you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I am immune to your coarse Americanisms.”

  “Oh, bugger!”

  “That's better. Now, about this American chap—”

  “Look,” Nicola exploded. “Don't be daft; his wife left him!”

  “And you left your husband.”

  “He was a violent asshole!”

  “Excuse you?”

  “Okay, ‘cad.’ That better? You've been spending too much time in the world of Victorian English … and animals. But how do I know Andrew isn't violent, too?”

  “You said yourself you didn't think he could be. May I remind you that this is a guy who tried to save a bloody sheep? Okay, that makes him really stupid, but nothing more. Besides, Lee really likes him, and one thing I've learned about my daughter, bless her quirky heart, is that she's a good judge of character. The evidence stands before me: You're her best friend.”

  “We all have our blind spots.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “Okay, okay. I'll give you this: There's something … I don't know … tender about him.”

  Anne laughed. “You'd probably be tender, too—though perhaps tenderized is a better word—if your wife walked out on you a year ago for another, richer fellow. But I'll tell you something: I think that man's got strength.”

  “Oh, and now you're a witch, too?”

  Anne tilted her head to one side and regarded her friend with a long-suffering look. “Want to know how I know that, or do you want to just keep up this verbal tennis match?”

  Nicola let out a resigned sigh.

  “I know it because of the way he comports himself with everyone
he's met here. He's a listener. His interest is real. He doesn't need to be the center of attention. How many men do you know like that?”

  “Besides your Roger?”

  “Yes, besides my Roger. And I see it in the way he treats Lilly. Most people need a lot of patience with that girl. Not him. He doesn't need patience because he respects her. He attends to her. He's exactly like you in that regard.

  “And then there's the matter of the hedge building. At first, I didn't get it. Why he'd come all this way just to build a wall? And then it came to me: It's not about the hedge. It's about something inside him trying to get out. It's like he's doing this work as if it were a sort of quest. As if he was searching for something in the stone that he's determined to find, and maybe it's himself. I was down to the Visitor Centre to deliver something to Elizabeth yesterday, and I watched him awhile with Jamie. And I had the strangest thought: It was as if with every stone he lifted and fit into the hedge, he was taking one down from the wall around himself. Know what I mean? What's that word they use now? Deconstructing, that's it! He's deconstructing himself. And I think that takes strength.”

  “Well, those stones are bloody heavy,” Nicola cracked.

  Anne made a face. “I don't know why I bother talking to you shallow Americans.”

  Nicola looked at her friend for several long moments.

  “Thank you, Anne,” she said finally. “But there's the other point, the obvious one …”

  “Which is?”

  “He'll be gone in—what—a week? I'm not about to fall in love with him.”

  “Well, you're right there. You're not about to, you already have. You're not immune, you know, just because you got stung once.”

  “Nonsense. And besides, you make it sound like a disease.”

  “It is. It's chronic, if you're lucky.”

  “Like you and Roger?”

  “Yes. Like me and Roger. You don't recover, and you don't want to. Even after all these years, it still feels feverish. You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I feel like an idiot advising a forty-year-old woman about love. Hell, I'm six years younger than you are!”